Civilians would never understand about battle. ‘I cannot describe all my feelings and all my experiences,’ another man wrote to his wife. He felt he could not reach her with words, nor she him. ‘The question of our meeting after the victory,’ he continued, ‘that’s what is worrying a lot of us right now.’21 ‘Many of my friends have died,’ an officer called Martov wrote to his family in February 1944. ‘The truth is that we fight together, and the death of each is our own. Sometimes there are moments of such strain that the living envy the dead. Death is not as terrible as we used to think.’22 Grief held the men together as much as shared hardship, but battle marked them out from everybody else. Whatever Stalin said about the whole nation’s collective work, by 1943 most front-line soldiers valued only combat and the comradeship of risk. By setting soldier against civilian, by raising fears of spies and stool pigeons, by setting the frontovik against the whole community of military ‘rats’ who did not fight, the war had shattered, not united, the Soviet people. Worst of all, combat had exiled front-line soldiers from themselves.
‘What’s the definition of effrontery?’ Ageev wrote one evening. ‘Effrontery means being somewhere far behind the lines, sleeping with the wives of frontoviki, beating one’s breast and crying “death to the fascist occupiers” and looking for one’s name in the lists of people who have been decorated for valour.’23 The men had been away for months, and the Red Army made scant provision for home leave.24 As the fear of defeat faded, terrors of a more intimate variety began to haunt the soldiers’ nights. They were crossing Soviet territory now. They knew about the hardship and the crime, the people’s desperation after two winters of total war. The married soldiers saw how local women often acted when they found a willing man, someone with food or cash, perhaps, or even just a guitar and some vodka. They all began to wonder what was going on at home.
Some of their fears were natural to soldiers on any long campaign, but Red Army troops faced more depressing terrors than the prospect of a ‘Dear John’ letter. ‘Write me something about Mama,’ a young lieutenant asked his godmother in February 1944. ‘There’s been no news from her since September 1941.’ The last time he had heard from her, his mother had been in her flat in Leningrad.25 In this, as in so many other cases, there would be no more news again. The fascist occupation had torn families apart. Aleksandr Slesarev, the tank lieutenant from Smolensk province, at least knew that some of his relatives were alive. The partisans had brought one letter out in 1942, a note from his young sister, Mariya.26 It was a catalogue of death and violation under Nazi rule. As the Germans retreated, more letters came, and now – with agonizing gaps – the family’s story began to take shape. As Slesarev fought south and west across Ukraine, he had to wait for weeks to receive news. Mariya wrote to their father in the first instance, and then the old man passed the news on to his soldier sons. Fourteen-year-old Mariya, working from dawn to dusk on the collective farm, could not find time to write to everyone at once.
The family had fled their village before the invaders came. For two winters they had been living in an earth dugout. It was cold and damp and the children were constantly ill, but at least they were alive. ‘They burned Danilkin’s family,’ Mariya wrote, ‘and the Germans took Yashka away. They burned the whole Liseyev family and the Gavrikovs too, and another fourteen girls who were on their way back from work in Yartsevo… At the same time we also lost Uncle Petya, he was coming from Ruchkovo, and the Germans caught him and burned him too.’ Then news came that the Red Army was close. The Germans started seizing cattle and sheep, leaving the local villagers to starve. Winter brought typhus, then pneumonia. There was another string of deaths. ‘At the time of the [Germans’] last retreat, Mama, Yura and I took cover with Uncle Mitya in a trench,’ Mariya finished. ‘Kolya, Uncle Egor and Shura all ran off to the woods at the same time, they were there for four days and nights. They liberated us on 18 March, and [those three] came out of the woods the next day.’27
Lieutenant Slesarev must have been relieved to read that his mother, sister and two little brothers had survived. He sent them money when he could, but inflation, shortages and a severe housing crisis had made their lives desperate. ‘It’s not great for food at the moment,’ Mariya wrote in January 1944, ‘and clothes are really a problem, especially shoes.’28 It was the same in Kursk, the same wherever either of the great armies had been. ‘It’s hard now that we don’t have cows,’ a peasant woman wrote from Kursk province. ‘They took them from us two months ago… We’re ready to eat each other… there isn’t a single young man at home now that they’re fighting.’29 ‘Everything was destroyed by the front,’ another woman told her soldier son. She had lost her home, her cow and her land. She was living, as many did, in a corridor outside her sister’s one-room flat. ‘We have not had bread for two months now,’ wrote another. ‘It’s already time for Lidiya to go to school, but we don’t have a coat for her, nor anything to put on her feet. I think Lidiya and I will die of hunger in the end. We haven’t got anything… Misha, even if you stay alive, we won’t be here…’30
Soldiers felt betrayed by their wives’ hardship stories. The least they had expected, while they risked their lives, was that the state would provide for their families. The begging letters read like accusations. In January 1943, the central committee of the Communist Party responded with a secret resolution on the families of serving troops. Aleksei Kosygin, a rising star, was put in charge of welfare. His job was to make sure that flour, potatoes and fuel would be provided on the usual sliding scale of privilege from officers to men. But officials in the provinces could not turn rubble into houses overnight, nor conjure flour from ash. In May 1944, a survey in the Kursk region found 17,740 orphans and nearly half a million soldiers’ families in need of urgent help. Of the families, just 32,025 were in receipt of pensions and supplies of food.31 The same story was repeated across European Russia. There were over a quarter of a million soldiers’ families on the register in Smolensk region by 1944. More than 12,000 of these were living in earth dugouts. Nearly 11,000 soldiers’ children in the region could not attend the newly opened local schools because they had no shoes.32
The families of decorated soldiers, the heroes, were supposed to get extra help. It was an incentive with genuine appeal. The promise of privileged access to food and heating fuel for their wives and mothers was all it took to convince some soldiers that they were valued more than their comrades. But when the promise was not kept, such men’s indignation was also proportionately greater. Letters of protest, angry demands from combatants who felt entitled to an audience, piled up on bureaucratic desks, but all the outrage in the world could not ease this crisis. In the spring of 1944, rural soviets in some regions were warning that the hunger in their villages would soon lead to fatalities. Hero of the Soviet Union P. L. Pashin went home to one of the affected districts to visit his family. He found them in a desperate condition. He appealed to the local collective farm to issue them with bread or potatoes, but the committee was unable to meet his request. Another Hero’s family was found to be in ‘severe need’ of clothes, shoes and dry accommodation.33 Mariya Slesarev continued to write to her father. ‘It’s a really bad situation for bread,’ she wrote in July 1944, ‘and with potatoes also.’ The prices were impossible. Her brother was sending her fifty roubles a month, occasionally supplementing it with more, but a litre of milk cost fifteen roubles, a cup of salt as much as twenty-four and flour 800 roubles a pood.34